


the yellow glass

by relationshipcrimes



Series: shuake week 2019 [5]
Category: Persona 5
Genre: Character Study, Gen, I Wrote This For Shuake Week But There Is Actually No Shuake, M/M, Self Harm Imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-16 08:35:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21033350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/relationshipcrimes/pseuds/relationshipcrimes
Summary: When Akira was in middle school, there was some silly rumor going around that if you looked at a TV at midnight while it was raining, you’d see your soulmate.





	the yellow glass

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Shuake Week 2019, Day 5: Childhood/Adulthood.

When Akira was in middle school, there was some silly rumor going around that if you looked at a TV at midnight while it was raining, you’d see your soulmate. It’s the sort of absolutely inane, useless village rumor that means nothing. By the time they were in high school, everyone used to say: Oh, remember the Midnight Channel? What a bunch of suckers we were for thinking that was real. And then Akira would have to keep his mouth shut and say nothing, so that people didn’t think he was crazy.

You see, one late rainy night, when Akira was studying for his middle school midterms, he heard his bedroom TV turn on.

Akira was always a fan of midnight to begin with, anyway. He routinely studied with all the lights off except his desk lamp, so the lights outside were dimmer, the night thicker, the stars clearer. Yesterday’s worries are yesterday; tomorrow’s responsibilities are tomorrow. Time disappears. Pretenses fall away. Akira was made for dark places, really. He wasn't alarmed when he looked up from his little circle of lamplight and math worksheets, and the rest of his room was lit in an electronic sunny yellow, flickering with its unsteady broadcast.

There was no one on the screen at all.

His bedroom clock ticked.

Eventually, he stood up.

Akira was a normal kid—_is_ a normal kid. When he was in middle school, there was nothing unusual about him. He wasn’t even unusually unusual. He wasn’t particularly shy, nor was he outspoken. He wasn’t a tepid person. He had friends. He laughed too loudly sometimes. He went to two clubs, but mostly forgot to go to one of them. He skipped class a not-unusual number of times, so he wasn’t a square. He got good grades and sometimes had irritated conversations with his parents, but mostly not.

It was the moments when he’d pass through doorways and stand in the foyer of his own home that he’d feel like something was wrong, something was terribly wrong, but there was nothing wrong because he was just standing in a foyer with one shoe off and his mother telling him to come eat. Or when he’d walk into a classroom and see all the desks and chairs in their neat rows and the linoleum underneath, dirty and cracked, and feel like he was staring at a series of lines and squares and perpendicular crosses, smudges of color, surrounded by shapes that meant nothing, except that wasn’t right because the teacher was telling him to sit down and he had to do that, didn’t he, he had to follow the rules and take out his homework. The PA system would turn on. The principal would talk about the rules of the school. Akira would stare out the window and wonder what the point of this was—the announcement, the class, the school, the courtyard, the town, Inaba, the rules, the rules, the _rules_.

In the Midnight Channel’s yellow haze, the skin of society’s rules seemed so thin. In that instant, he knew with the conviction of a thirteen-year-old that the Midnight Channel was real and right and nothing else in the world was.

He walked towards the TV without thinking.

See—why _wouldn’t_ the Midnight Channel be real? Everything else about living already felt fake. _Wasn't_ it fake? Why _did_ he have to go to school and learn things he didn't care about? Why _did_ he need to marry a girl and get a house? Why _did_ he need to major in business, shell out money for a college degree—why _did_ he need to argue in student government and read about the politicians arguing in the newspapers as the fake laws people made to defend their crumbling world-views splinter and crack under their own self-importance?

The only thing he'd ever felt to be real was what he knew to be right and what he knew to be wrong. Was that not enough? Why was it that real life felt like a manufactured image behind a glass screen? He was made to live in the real world—he was so sure of it, like he was sure he knew right from wrong, as sure as he could feel his own two hands, and sometimes, like now, he was so sure that the glass between him and the rest of life would finally let him throu—

His hand pressed flat against the screen. It was solid and unyielding under his palm.

The TV flicked off.

He pulled his hand away. The TV screen was unblemished save the smudge of his palm. The rain was quiet outside.

The next morning, Akira got up and had his breakfast across his mother, who told him to be good (why?) but nothing was wrong so he nodded and drank his milk and locked the door behind him. The road to school was (lines and shapes) sparsely populated with other children walking through last night’s rain, distant figures on the foggy sidewalk. A kid in his class told him good morning (but something was wrong), looking mild and content as most middle schoolers tend to be on a lukewarm uneventful day (which wasn't real), and Akira said good morning back because nothing was wrong. Nothing was wrong. They were just walking to school (it’s _wrong_), following the same road they always did, rounding the corner at the MOEL station, which stood squat and square in dull colors, a handpainted image in flat tones on a colorless screen.

“Good morning,” said the MOEL attendant cheerfully.

“Good morning,” said Akira’s classmate.

Because he was imagining it, because nothing was wrong, because he _was_ here even if he didn't feel like it and because the MOEL station was real even if he knew it wasn't, because Akira was a normal boy, Akira said, “Good morning." It _was_ a morning. Everyone else said it was good. There was nothing wrong with the MOEL attendant’s smile.

By the time Akira enrolled in high school, he’d convinced himself he was just crazy after all. 

*

The Phantom Thieves' special talent is having never once forgotten a single wrong made against them in their entire lives. Of the nine of them, no one is better at this than Goro Akechi.

It really is quite impressive if you get him going, actually. After Yaldabaoth, Akira learns a whole laundry list of the ways that Goro’s childhood was wrong in loud and violent ways, like Goro had grown up staring directly into the open, bleeding wound of society’s underbelly for eighteen years straight. Goro never thinks that his own hatred for Shido is crazy, which is both endearing, worrying, and deeply reassuring. 

See, you’re not crazy for thinking the world’s fucked up if you have evidence. And Goro Akechi keeps a _lot_ of evidence. It gets to the point that Goro keeps _other people's_ evidence, able to rattle off all the ways Ryuji probably should have decked his track team in their faces, or the ways Ann should have been angrier at her parents for abandoning her in Japan alone, or the ways Makoto should give Sae hell for what she's done. Goro Akechi reminds Akira on a _weekly_ basis exactly how angry Akira should be at _Goro_.

Because of this, Goro’s convictions shine like flawless gunmetal, polished and tailored to the wrongs it seeks to right. Because of this, Akira has more faith in Goro’s hatred than Akira does in God.

Akira hopes it doesn’t say anything about him, that he’s collected so many friends who’ve seen the worst society has to offer and can speak about the concrete, precise instances of how they’ve been wronged. Akira likes watching Shadows die. Akira likes seeing Shadows, full stop. He likes seeing palaces. He likes finding treasures and pulling them from the Metaverse with his own hands. There’s something viscerally satisfying in seeing exactly how fucked up the world can be with his own eyes. He likes seeing the evidence reminding him that he wasn’t wrong about that unsettled feeling after all, even if he never could and still can’t place where it comes from. He heard once that people made monsters to put a name and a face and a body to the nameless, faceless, incorporeal wrongnesses that they couldn’t pin down and hunt. He heard once that the Midnight Channel was just made up by lonely high schoolers, afraid of living and dying alone. Something is wrong in the world—he knows it—he’s not wrong. He can prove it. He can show you the wound himself. And if there is no wound, he’ll just have to make his own.

**Author's Note:**

> twitter [@r_crimes](https://twitter.com/r_crimes)  
tumblr [@akechicrimes](http://akechicrimes.tumblr.com)


End file.
